This week’s Crawley News cleared up a little confusion I had about the previous week’s editorial.

The way I understand it, a newspaper’s editorial or comment column makes some sort of observation or voices an opinion on a piece of current news reported in that paper. Between Christmas and New Year the Crawley News editorial went on about whether it was right for the leader of the council to go off to South Africa for training, but I couldn’t see any reference to that anywhere in the rest of the paper and didn’t know what it was on about.

At the time I thought it was a bit strange, and then this week the front page story is all about the leader of the council going off to South Africa as part of a course.

So lets try and understand this: the editor thinks that its a big enough story to go across the front page and also thinks that in the last publication of the year, when he could be making some general comment about the year as a whole, he thinks he should be asking about the rights and wrongs of our tax paying for trips to Africa. If its that important, why not print the story itself a week earlier?

As for the story itself, its very reminiscent of the one a year earlier, also the result of digging into the council’s expense claims under FoI legislation, about councillors and staff going to Rotterdam to learn about town planning. At least its a proper bit of investigative journalism – digging around to find stuff out instead of waiting to be told. Better than just skimming YouTube, Facebook and local bulletin boards for stories.

I don’t know whether the trip itself was a good idea or not since I don’t know anything about what was done. On the face of it, there seems to be little in common with Crawley. In my ignorance, my first thought on reading that Bob went off to Gauteng province was to think that it must be all work and no play going somewhere remote like that, rather than somewhere comfortable like Johannesburg. And then I looked it up and found that Johannesburg is actually in Gauteng province. A trip to Johannesburg doesn’t sound quite as worthy and serious as a visit to Gauteng province does it?

It does all sound a bit unnecessary, but it may well have been value for money if the cost really was £676 , which sounds unfeasibly low. I can only assume that some costs were paid for by the Leadership Centre for Local Government, or that Bob paid his own way to some extent, or that some expenses were missed. (The trip was in November. It can take time to get around to claiming for hotels and meals. Another question about expenses in a month or two might uncover that)

However, if you wanted to book a three-day leadership course with Learning Tree in London it would cost £1,400 just for the course – not including any travel, subsistence or accommodation. I am pretty sure I have incurred far greater costs myself on various courses my employers have sent me on in the past.

Without knowing the details I can’t defend the trip, and I’m not inclined to anyway. It sounds like a bit of a mis-judgement, like the Rotterdam visits. A five-day residential course in Birmingham might have cost a lot more, it just wouldn’t have looked so bad.

Putting it into perspective though, £676 is probably less than our friend Tex Pemberton spent on drinks at the award ceremony for Fastway, or less than Henry Smith claims each month in mileage to get to Chichester and back. More importantly, it is less than a third of the above-inflation pay rise which Henry and his cabinet colleagues voted for themselves in December – something which has gone completely unreported in both Crawley newspapers!

The only mention of the county council increases in allowances was in a letter written to the Crawley Observer by Stephen Joyce. Why is it that a £30,000 increase in WSCC cabinet and committee chair allowances, which was against specific advice from an independent panel, has not been mentioned at all, while a £676 overseas jolly by one councillor is splashed across the front page?

Fair play to the News for uncovering a good story, but a de-merit for then letting it obscure a bigger one. I think they should be making some FoI enquiries of County Hall as well as the Town Hall.